France’s Macron picks a needless fight with the United States

“They learned nothing and forgot nothing,” the French foreign minister Talleyrand is reputed to have complained about the country’s Bourbon monarchs, exiled after the French Revolution.

If President Emmanuel Macron’s pointless trip to Beijing and the anti-American undertones of his musings about Europe’s “strategic autonomy” are an indication, similarly few lessons have been drawn by France’s current leadership from the experience of the past 14 months.

Predictably, Macron has failed to convince Xi Jinping to condemn Russia’s war against Ukraine. And although he was accompanied by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the “Jupiterian” leader could not resist making himself the center of attention, as if speaking on behalf of the entire European Union.

Nobody should fall for it: Macron represents only his tenuous parliamentary majority and his supersized ego, not Europeans at large.

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